Part 1 – The moments that shaped me
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Legacy, family history, my history, my story. My heritage.
They all are personal. I can share them. But it will ever be mine, as much as it will probably trigger your own memories. Because my story is mine, it is unique. Nothing special about it, just unique.
Whatever it is, memories are ever only ours.
My heritage is sights and sounds. Light and shadows. Words, songs, rhymes, illusions, allusions. And deceiving certainties. Some I am certain of, all can be delusion. The accepted wisdom, the imagined inventions, the leaps of faith, the comforting haze of memories.
All these are the truths. All these are the reality. They are real in the moment.
My story is dreamlike kaleidoscopic fragments bursting into dusty explosions. None of it is strictly facts – it does not need to be. I was there, I remember that, I remember when I heard another family tale. Retelling it, I make you a witness. It gives it materiality, but do not expect chronology. Chronology, the factual, measured, seemingly inexorable march of history. My story is nothing like that. My actual chronology is one of discovery, or of re-discovery. And it is of course how I retell it, how I shape it for you.
It is factual, yet artificial memory. It can only be storytelling.
The telling is part of the sequencing: with new experiences, with more time, with more or less interest, what it sounds like, what it looks like, the once-obvious logics of memories change. It is ever captured in this moment.
This is my story the way I picture it, not the way it was nor is. It is my story, as much as their story, as much as our story. The way I see it.
Setting the scene
Ever-blue skies of summer turning into an open air retirement home. Infinite horizons suddenly chocked by mine operations. Kid’s wonder turning teenage performative drama to adult frustration. Or kid’s enthusiasm turning into teenage discoveries and adult wisdom. Your pick.
The family dinner that everyone dreads, hates, repeats and yet can’t help to fawn about.
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What built me, what built our family, is coming from Africa. Sufficiently odd, near and far away in kilometres, decades and culture. The source material for a dystopian Wakanda or colonial Africa. Jadotville, Panda Likasi, an African California, CoquetteVille, or an oversized tumbleweed town of 650k inhabitants.
In my memory, the romantic forgotten world of an African Atlantis. My heritage.
And our family story? Vignettes, pictures, shaky movies, a tent, a car on a cover of a Tintin album. And endless days staring through the window at the same steel blue sky. Endless empty days, weeks, months that you will miss one day, at the death.
A story retold.
In my upcoming articles, I would like to share my story with you.
I will speak about my heritage as in my mind’s eye. Lost cultures, societies, outdated standards, my grandparents too, school maybe, countries certainly, as words, images, trigger memories.
Fragment and flashes that endure at the back of my eyes.
Stay tuned for more.
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